As companies continue to cut back on travel expenses, conference calls are becoming increasingly important in doing business both within the company and with other companies. One problem associated with conference calls is that not all of the conference call participants speak at the same level. In other words, some participants speak louder than others. The discrepancy between speaking levels of a loud participant and a quiet participant can make it difficult for many of the other participants to understand the speaking participant. Changing the master volume for the conference call is not an acceptable option because the level of discrepancy between a loud participant and a quiet participant remains the same. Thus, in order for the conference call to be at an acceptable volume, the listening party must increase the volume for quiet talkers and decrease the volume for loud talkers. The frequent volume changes are distracting to the listening party. Therefore, a need exists in the art for a method of adjusting the volume level of individual participants.
The prior art has previously addressed problems associated with conference calls. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,327,567 (the '567 patent) entitled “Method and System for Providing Audio in Conference Calls” discloses a method for differentiating conference call participants by creating different special orientations between the conference call participants' voices. The invention in the '567 patent modifies the structure of the voice signal of the participants in order to create the different special orientations. However, the invention in the '567 patent still does not solve the problem of reducing the difference in volume levels between loud participants and quiet participants. Therefore, a need still exists for a method and system for automatically adjusting the volume level or a plurality of conference call participants so that the participants' voices are all the same volume level.